This specification provides the definition of the Financial statement of an account message (FINSTA) to be used in Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) between trading partners involved in administration, commerce and transport.

This message can be used to cater for various communication functions between financial institutions and their customers. The most frequent function is to provide a statement of booked items confirming entries on a customer's account. The message type may contain several accounts (quoted in the B-level).

The Financial statement of an account message may be used for both national and international applications. It is based on universal practice related to administration, commerce and transport, and is not dependent on the type of business or industry.

This section should be read in conjunction with the segment table which indicates mandatory, conditional and repeating requirements.

The following semantic principles apply to the message and are intended to facilitate the understanding and implementation of the message: The Financial Statement of an Account message is structured in three levels: A,B and C. Level A starts with the UNH segment, level B starts with the LIN segment in Segment Group 4 and level C starts with the SEQ segment in Segment Group 6.

Level A contains general data related to the whole message and is contained in Segment Groups 1, 2, 3 and 7. - Level B contains the account related details such as balances, account number. Furthermore, this level describes the kind of statement. - Level C contains the single item as it was advised to the customer by a debit/credit advice. Furthermore, this level contains any level B of a multiple message such as PAYMUL, DEBMUL or CREMUL. In some special cases it is possible, that several B levels are contained in a message without any dependent C levels (balance confirmation for auditing purposes).

Where a choice of code or text is given only the code element should be used wherever possible.